1. Visitors to Dunleer

2. William Forster
1784 - 1854
Toured Ireland as a
Quaker Minister in
1813-14.
Member of the British
& Foreign Anti-Slavery
Society.

3. William Forster
“We came yesterday afternoon to Dunleer where we
appointed a meeting for the evening. It is a small town with
very few Protestants and it was known that a meeting had
been held there before by any Friend. We had a good-sized
room for the purpose. I think I never saw so many persons
assembled with so little appearance of seriousness. They
were principally the poor native Irish. A man was among
them who had been drinking in the house…. After I had
been speaking for a while, this man got up… threatening to
fetch the priest. All was confusion in a moment; the poor
people fled in every direction, both out of the door and the
windows.” Memoirs of William Forster (Quaker) 1865 p.152

4. Vere Foster
April 25th, 1819 – December 21st, 1900
Diplomat in the British Foreign Office until his
return to Ireland in 1847
Founder of the Belfast School of Art & patron of many
schools and the Royal Victoria Hospital.
Assisted 25,000 people to start new lives in the
Americas and spent £100,000 on other charitable
endeavors while living on £100 per year.

5. Vere Foster
“It is my intention to stop at Dunleer for a few
weeks to receive applications. I shall be there all
day on Sundays, Thursdays and holidays. I intend
to send about 140 girls and a few boys. Those
persons will be preferred who are in farm service,
who have the smallest wages and the best
recommendations and are the members of the
largest families, one only out of each family.”
Vere Foster c-1857 (Golden Bridge: Young
Immigrants to Canada, 1833-1939)

6. Methodist Review
“We passed through Dunleer, a small
town in which a fair was being held. The
spectacle was curious enough.
The goods, vegetables, live-stock &
what-not were disposed around in an
open space, mostly upon the ground.
Here was a pile of potatoes, and there was a woman with a
basket of trinkets; in one place, some calves tied together and
in another a number of pigs in the same condition. A Paddy
who had bought one of the ‘nice craturs’ was driving him
home, having a hay-rope tied to his leg, while he walked along
as orderly as a trained ox. But the scene cannot be described.
Such a medley of matters & things, discordant and in strange
juxtaposition, we never looked upon before.” Methodist
Review 1847 p.625

7. Henry Grattan
3 July 1746 – 6 June 1820
• Member of pre-1800 Irish House
of Commons.
• Led the movement seeking Irish
legislative independence; ‘Grattan’s
Parliament’ lasted from 1782 to
1800.
• Spent his last 15 years in the British House of
Commons, fighting for Catholic Emancipation.

8. Henry Grattan
“I am at Foster’s, at Dunleer. His son and I are at
College; the family are agreeable, the
neighborhood social and the country pretty.”
Memoirs of Henry Grattan (p48, 1839)
Reference to Anthony Kearns of Dunleer, aged 25.

9. Eliakim Littell
2 January 1797 – 17 May 1870
• American editor and founder of the
long-lived periodical Littell’s Living Age (1844-1941)
“I cannot forget our terror on that winter journey to
Dublin, as we approached Dunleer, whereabouts
the exploits of a robber named Collier were well-
known.” The Living Age (1844, p.539)

10. Sir Walter Scott
15th Aug 1771 – 21st Sep 1832
* Scottish historical novelist, poet
and playwright.
* Famous titles include Ivanhoe,
Rob Roy, The Lady of the Lake,
Waverly, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of
Lammermoor.

11. Sir Walter Scott
“ An old man at Dunleer having got some pence
from Anne while the carriage stopt, an older
woman came forward to sell gooseberries, and
we, declining these, she added that we might as
well give her an alms too then, for she was an old
struggler. Anne thought she said smuggler and
dreamt of potheen but she meant that she had
done her best to resist the ‘sea of trouble’,
whereas her neighbor, the professed mendicant,
had yielded to the stream too easily.”
(Memoirs of the life of Sir Walter Scott, 1837)

12. The United Irishmen – Nancy J. Curtin
By the summer of 1792 Defenderism had
become particularly rampant in North
Leinster. In Louth, in December 1792 Defenders
raided the houses of nearly forty Protestants in a
quest for arms. Faulkner’s Dublin Journal
reported that the rebels, ‘infested the road from
Drogheda to Dunleer stopping passengers for
arms.’ When seven hundred Defenders paraded
with arms near Dunleer, Freeman’s Journal
claimed that they ‘consisted of the lowest
peasantry of the country.’

13. Thomas Reid
• 1791 – 1825
• Prison Reformer.
• Surgeon superintendent on convict ships bound
for Sydney and Hobart.

14. Thomas Reid
“Having last night taken a place to Drogheda in a coach
that starts from Dundalk every morning at four, I rose
early today and at the usual hour the coach set off. The
first stage to Castlebellingham we got on very well but
the horses we took from that place could not be kept on
the road. Several times the coach was near being
overturned. The driver flogged the poor animals most
unmercifully. One of them fell down in the street of
Dunleer, and in a few minutes expired… The peasantry
of the county of Louth are uncommonly strong, robust
and healthy, and rather more respectable in their general
appearance than many of the others I have seen. Their
clothing is of domestic manufacture chiefly.”
Travels in Ireland in the year 1822, p233. (Thomas Reid)

15. Sir Richard Hoare, 2nd Baronet
9 Dec 1758 – 19 May 1838
English antiquarian , artist and
archeologist.
Author of Recollections Abroad,
A Classical Tour Through Italy &
Sicily as well as Tour in Ireland.

16. Sir Richard Hoare, 2nd Baronet
“Mud cottages as well as the long grey coats
reappear. The Inn at Dunleer (an old Mansion-
house) is tolerable.”
Journal of a Tour in Ireland (1806, p.237)

17. Adam Clarke
1762 – 1832
• British Methodist theoligian and Biblical scholar.
• Author of ‘Commentary on the Bible’ (1831)

18. Adam Clarke
“Our next stage was Dundalk, ten Irish miles from
Dunleer. On the way we saw a poor decent woman
with a child, endeavoring to induce a shark of a carr-
man to carry her and her child into Dundalk which he
refused to do under ten penny pieces and a glass of
whiskey.”
An Account of the Infancy, Religious & Literary Life of
Adam Clarke. (Volume 2, 1833)

19. Thomas Kitson Cromwell
1792 – 1870
• English dissenting minister & antiquary.
• Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.
• Author of:
- Excursions Through Ireland
- Walks Through Islington
- The Soul and The Future Life

20. Thomas Kitson Cromwell
“Dunleer, much decayed from its former consequence, is
situated on a streamlet flowing into the River Dee… Most of
the inhabitants of this village and its vicinity speak English
but they prefer the Irish for domestic intercourse. The
children almost universally in this neighbourhood
understand English and are always able to explain and
interpret to strangers when their parents are unaquainted
with it. In their style of dress, the peasantry of this part of
the country, the females more particularly, have much
improved within these few years, shoes and stockings, it
may be observed, are universal with both sexes.”
Excursions through Ireland. (Thomas Cromwell, 1820)

21. Arthur Young
• English writer on agriculture, economics and
social statistics.
• Pioneer in the use of sample surveys on national
income statistics.
• Advocate of peasant proprietorship – “The magic
of property turns sand to gold.”

22. Arthur Young
Arthur Young toured Ireland 1776-1779. He visited Baron Foster,
who had been born in Dunleer, at Collon. He expressed surprise
to the Baron at the severity of Popery Laws. The Baron stated
that they were severe in the letter, but never executed. He
instanced the severe penalties about reading Mass, but made
the point that there was a mass house in his village. The
Baron’s account of the laws against Catholics reminded Young,
however, of Edmund Burke’s statement in the House of
Commons, “Connivance is the relaxation of slavery, not the
definition of liberty.” By law, school-mastering by Catholics, the
maintenance of a tutor by Catholic families or sending Catholics
overseas was prohibited. In practice, better-off Catholics
managed to have their children educated abroad. At home,
schoolmasters were numerous.

23. Richard Twiss in his Tour of Ireland in
1776 states in relation to his visit to
Dunleer:
• I observed about a dozen bare-legged boys sitting by the side of
the road scrawling on scraps of paper placed on their knees;
these lads, it appears, found the smoke in their school or cabin
insufferable.
• I then proceeded to Dunleer; the country produces potatoes,
wheat, flax and oats, the enclosures are mostly of loose stones
piled on each other; over the door or chimney, the same
opening serving for both, of many of the cabins, I observed a
board with the words ‘good dry lodgings’; however as I was sure
that hogs could not read, I avoided mistaking them for styes.
The brass coins of the Isle of Man are current all along the
coast. The beggars here are not exorbitant in their demands,
most of them offering a bad halfpenny, what they call a ‘rap’ and
soliciting a good one in exchange.

24. ...contd
• He then goes on to describe the boys who were at
school, already mentioned and continues, ‘the
bridles, stirrups and cruppers, which compose the
horse furniture of the peasants are only wisps of
stray; however I procured a horse with
extraordinary accoutrements, as they were of
leather and rode to Monasterboice, which is about
three miles from Dunleer, to see the round tower –
110’ in height.’

25. Richard Twiss was hostile to
Ireland and to its people:
• “It might be better that the lowest class of
people throughout Europe were neither
taught to read nor write, excepting those
few who discover evident marks of genius;
those acquisitions only creating new wants
and exciting new desires, which they will
seldom be able to gratify and consequently
rendering them less happy than otherwise
they might be.”

26. Philip Luckombe was a printer and writer
of 19th century Irish travel literature
• We proceeded to Dunleer, six miles further north, on
the road to which place the inclosures are chiefly made
of loose stones, piled on each other, without mortar or
even clay and the roads sprinkled with wretched cabins
more like hog-sties than the dwellings of human beings
who, too frequently intrude upon the view and solicit
charity. Dunleer is a post town and it stands on a small
river that empties itself into the Irish Sea. From Dunleer,
we visited Atherdee and Lowth, when we again
returned eastward and, after seven miles riding along
the seashore, arrived at Dundalk, where Lord
Clanbrassil has a house and fine gardens.